Edward Espe Brown may have written what’s considered the bible of bread baking, “The Tassajara Bread Book,” and co-written “The Greens Cookbook,” featuring recipes from Deborah Madison’s iconic vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco, which he helped found, but don’t look for a recipe for flaky biscuits or a vegetable lasagna in Brown’s newest cookbook.

In fact, don’t look for any recipes at all. There aren’t any. Instead, “No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice” (248 pages, Sounds True, $17.95) invites cooks and would-be cooks to explore, to taste, to trust, to experience and to value their honest efforts, and then generously and lovingly share those efforts.

It’s not about following a recipe and expecting everything will come out as it “should” — although, he says, it might.

“The problem with recipes is that they blind us to the reality that nothing is fixed and that we are creating reality from scratch as we go along,” he writes. “Beyond the recipe, could we aim to bring out the best in the food — and in one another, rather than aiming to behave properly?”

Brown, an ordained Zen priest and the first head cook at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, has always snuck some spirituality into his cookbooks. But this is his first cookbook that is a lot more explicit — without being preachy — about the sacredness of cooking and eating.

“To eat is to take in life and make it yours — to make the world you,” he writes. “If you want to do it by the book, OK, but if you want to do it from your heart, from your felt sense, give yourself back your capacity to make your own choices rather than doing what the world tells you.”

And that goes for figuring out your life, too. There is no recipe to follow for living your authentic life, he says.

Brown likes to tell a story — it’s in the book, too — of what that looks like.

“When I first made biscuits at Tassajara they didn’t come out right so I tried making them without milk and with water instead and they didn’t come out right. And I tried making them without the eggs and with the eggs, and they didn’t come out right. And I tried making them with Crisco instead of butter and they didn’t come out right. Finally I thought, right compared to what?” he says by phone from his Fairfax home. “I realized I was trying to make the biscuits I grew up with, which was Bisquick and Pillsbury. Why would I want my biscuits to taste like Bisquick and Pillsbury? Why don’t I just taste the biscuits of today?

“In some ways that’s basic Zen but it’s also to say Zen isn’t any different than the rest of our lives,” says Brown, the subject of a 2007 documentary, “How to Cook Your Life.” “Why don’t you experience today and stop trying to make it come out according to some outdated picture or image you have of how a life should be, how a life should turn out? Could you allow something and appreciate something to be appearing for the first and only time it’s going to be in this world? Here it is, this moment. What do we do with this moment?”

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For a cookbook that has no recipes, it surprisingly wasn’t a hard concept to sell to his publisher. But, even after writing five cookbooks, “No Recipe” was tougher than the 72-year-old Brown thought.

“The publisher was interested. It was more my own doubts that got in the way of the book. I kept hearing this voice saying, ‘You know, people want to know how to make masterful recipes with little stress and no effort, and you’re not writing that book. C’mon,’” says Brown, who teaches cooking classes at Buddhist retreat centers in Europe.

And doubts are often what keep people out of the kitchen in the first place. It’s taken some time, but Brown has come to realize that what we cook or bake isn’t always going to come out the way we expected or hoped for or wanted — and that’s OK. It isn’t our job to make sure everyone approves of us and our efforts. We shouldn’t be cooking for someone else’s approval anyway, he says — we should just take joy in the process, put our heart into it, make our hands do something, and hope for the best.

“You yourself are worthy, wise and compassionate, and you can bring that to life in the kitchen and out and about,” he writes.

Publisher’s Weekly praises his book for its “down-to-earth wisdom, generous spirit and exuberant encouragement simply to cook.”

But who, exactly, is a no-recipe cookbook for?

“People who are open and curious, and also people who have shifted away from what I call performance to presence. At some point, if not sooner, midlife, when it’s like, ‘I’ve done everything the way I’m supposed to do it and it’s not working out the way it’s supposed to!’” he says with a laugh.

“So, this book is for people whose life hasn’t worked out the way it’s supposed to according to the recipe.”

‘No Recipe’ gems

• Avoid being swayed by what’s trendy: “When we more or less blindly follow along, we are abandoning our own capacity to find out for ourselves, neglecting to use our own interest and curiosity, our beginner’s mind.”

• Don’t fear unpleasant tastes: “[L]imiting our awareness to avoid unpleasant experiences means that we will also not notice what is pleasurable and deeply nourishing. ... No wonder people like commercial foods — they’re so predictable. No risk. No possibility of experiencing something distasteful. And all too often, no vitality, no real life — in other words, no wilderness!”

• Don’t go through the motions: “When you stop going through the motions and instead manifest the stirring of soup, alive in the present moment, emotions may surface. ... Instead of telling your emotions to go away or acting them out with violence or volume, invite them to handle, stir, wash, touch, scrub, scour; invite them to see, smell, taste and delight in the play. ... The cook’s temperament is a passion for life. ...My encouragement is to turn afflictive emotions, as well as enthusiasm and exuberance, into something edible and nourishing — food.”

• See food as precious: “To make food precious, to sanctify it, you will need to see it that way — that is, handle it and taste it that way, what is precious is you yourself, consciousness itself, your capacity to treat something as precious. ... [A]t this time of experiencing the food judged best, are we giving thanks? Thanks to the wondrous, inexplicable mystery of Life giving life to life? Or are we still battling to gain what is better, what is best, glorifying in our standing — while not understanding that what is precious about food is seeing and tasting its inherent goodness.”

About the Author

Vicki Larson is an author and has been an award-winning lifestyles editor, writer and columnist at the IJ since 2004. She has worked as an editor in Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Walnut Creek, San Francisco, Napa and Miami. Reach the author at vlarson@marinij.com
or follow Vicki on Twitter: @omgchronicles.